Wednesday, July 15, 2015

Some news

Calculated Risk - California's budget surplus. Yet conservative libertarian small-government states like Kansas, Louisiana and Wisconsin, led by Presidential contenders, are all still flat broke. It's enough to make a neocon blow his top, if only the Republican echo chamber bothered to talk about facts instead of psychotic fantasies.

HL: You’ve said creditors objected to you because “I try and talk economics in the Eurogroup, which nobody does.” What happened when you did?

YV: It’s not that it didn’t go down well – it’s that there was point blank refusal to engage in economic arguments. Point blank. … You put forward an argument that you’ve really worked on – to make sure it’s logically coherent – and you’re just faced with blank stares. It is as if you haven’t spoken. What you say is independent of what they say. You might as well have sung the Swedish national anthem – you’d have got the same reply. And that’s startling, for somebody who’s used to academic debate. … The other side always engages. Well there was no engagement at all. It was not even annoyance, it was as if one had not spoken.

It'd be nice to say the whole facade collapses once people bring the idiocy to light, but Stiglitz's writings on the IMF proved that to be a false hope.

Econospeak - slush-fund Schauble. As noted, Germans are just as corrupt as everyone else in Europe: it's just that German corruption concentrates on selling weapons of mass destruction to murderous dictators.

FT Alphaville - China's decreasing margin debt. It's back down to where it was in April, yet the A-shares are about 10% lower than they were in April. That sounds like a positive for the market.

Mining.com - hedge funds slash bullish gold bets. Wow, it's like an over 90% short market. The bottom's gotta be close, no? Has anyone told these guys it's bad to be part of a 300 ton short position when total monthly physical gold demand is about the same number?